On re-acceleration, pairs and the high-energy spectrum of AGN and Galactic black hole candidates

Details On re-acceleration, pairs and the high-energy spectrum of AGN and Galactic black hole candidates On re-acceleration, pairs and the high-energy spectrum of AGN and Galactic black hole candidates

Jul 1993

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1993mnras.263l...9g&link_type=abstract

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (ISSN 0035-8711), vol. 263, no. 1, p. L9-L12.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

35

Active Galactic Nuclei, Black Holes (Astronomy), Compton Effect, X Ray Sources, X Ray Spectra, Astronomical Models, Electrons, Photons, Positrons, Space Plasmas

Scientific paper

OSSE on CGRO and SIGMA on GRANAT have recently shown that the hard X-ray spectra of several Seyfert AGN are steep like the spectra from Galactic black hole candidates. This suggests that the X-rays in these sources are produced by a thermal plasma. There are, however, problems in maintaining a thermal plasma in such rapidly varying sources, since it may not have time to thermalize, especially if the thermalization process is driven by two-body particle interactions. We show here that non-thermal and thermal plasmas produce the same high-energy spectrum if multiple Compton scattering is the main emission mechanism and the maximum energy of the emitting particle population is limited to a few MeV. This will occur in an emission region that is subject to repeated heating, whatever the initial particle spectrum. We propose re-acceleration of electron-positron pairs as a feedback mechanism which can keep the maximum energy of the emitting particles in the required range. Using self-consistent particle and photon distributions, we show that this model can account for the observed spectra.

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